[evilduck]

It's probably multi-faceted. Part of me thinks it's just something they use internally extensively and that branching out to the public means they can easily hire talent to work on their own projects. It's also probably an effort to stay relevant and make amends with web developers, who have long held them in low regard.

And yeah, Azure is a booming business for them. VSCode has a bunch of first-party extensions that reduce friction for working on their platform.